For the streams that flow into the Sink, the Sink was once the sea. That’s where it all ended, though that sea would overflow its shores on occasion, letting the accumulated salts flow to the Pacific. Today the river deltas vanish into a sea of crops, a great Cartesian grid painted in green tones.
The Sink in 1874
The primeval sea had not been parkland or paradise. The lakes of the Sink were not scenic, but hidden behind jungles of bulrush the Spaniards called tule, their fish fat with the clouds of malarial mosquitoes that bred upon them. Every summer, as the snow packs on the Range receded and the stream flows dropped, the retreating shores of the lakes would leave muddy bathtub rings of rotting fish cake. Most everywhere else, the land was already parched, with months more of drought yet to come.
By the time Zal came to the Sink, water diversion and irrigation had long covered the deserts and seasonal swamps with a perfect geometry of crops. All that remained of the lakes were blue outlines on maps whose intent seemed to be to depict ghosts of geography; imaginary districts of lost significance. An uninterrupted vastness of rectangular verdure stretched across the Sink, doubly blessed by drought and snowmelt, juxtaposed by the eye against golden hills. Many crops now filled the sink for which rain is a foe. Keeping their foliage dry in this desert basin of about seven inches of rain per year, the crops suck what water they need from irrigation pipes. It is too efficient a machine to permit any runoff to speak of, so the salts in the water cover the soil until they reflect the sun like snow.
Today, the Sink that was is gone, but there are those occasional floods that bring back the old lakes for an ephemeral moment, like a phantom visitation at year’s end. And there are phantoms in the weight of the air and the calm of the sloughs that sometimes whisper to the sleeping.